


Bunker

by d__T



Series: Indigo North [6]
Category: Original Work
Genre: PTSD, Rape trauma, Reckless Behavior, Self Harm, h/c kinda, questionable medical and dental practices, repetitive intrusive thoughts, unspecified drug use
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-22
Updated: 2016-02-22
Packaged: 2018-05-22 14:05:23
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 16
Words: 5,773
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6082191
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/d__T/pseuds/d__T
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The MVP of any demolition derby is the guy with the sledgehammer making the car car-shaped again.<br/>----<br/>Indigo tries to recover from being assaulted by the Xi's.<br/>----<br/>Please read the notes and the tags.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Day Of

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is the aftermath to the hijacking thread with @nomadscag. The top post is [here](https://warboywhisper.tumblr.com/post/132313589597/nomadscag-warboywhisper-nomadscag-the) if you want to go through the arduous task of reading it.
> 
> The summary: the truck Indigo is crewing with gets hijacked by the new gang Nomad is running with. Indigo makes some really stupid choices, and the gang rapes him.
> 
> This is not a happy fic. Very few good things happen in it.
> 
> My always-on-point beta is [Najanaja](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Najanaja/). Nomad also belongs to him.

Evening grows by the time they reach the bunker. A pair of ferals greets them at the barred door, hoping for easy entry. Eric nails one to the ground with a crossbow bolt, which thoroughly discourages his friend.

It’s not the nicest bunker they’ve ever had the misfortune of using, but it’s certainly not the worst on the route. The door unlocks itself after being fed a key, and a combination, and a certain amount of cussing. Now is when they’d be rushed from the dark, but it is curiously silent. Nothing comes at them in the vulnerable place between the truck and the bunker door.

Eric bars the door behind them as Joe carries Indigo down into the bunker. It’s completely dark except for the swallowed up glimmer of Eric’s lighter. Joe places Indigo down on a cot as Eric seeks out the lanterns. He finds several, the first to his hand a battery torch. The switch slides under his thumb without effect.

Eric turns his face to the ceiling and speaks in a calm, measured tone. “Lord, even if we deserve nothing kind for this day, he does.”

The light flares on in his hands, suddenly blinding. Joe cheers as Indigo groans and rolls over to face the wall. He sets it down on top of the water barrel, and turns another on and brings it to nearby Indigo’s cot. Joe finds a camp stove and a near miracle; fuel for it. The water from the barrel smells stale but not bad, but they boil a bowl of it anyway to make sure it’s clean as Joe pilfers the medkits for salve and disinfectant.

Joe crouches by Indigo, where the man can see him. “Hey Indigo?”

Indigo slits his eyes open against the dim light.

“You did good out there. Really well. But you’re hurt pretty bad. You’re gonna be fine, but you gotta stay with me'n Eric while we clean you up, okay?”

Joe’s got questions, like “How the fuck did they know your name?” and “what the fuck did you do to them up in the truck?” But now is not the time.

Together, he and Eric free Indigo from the blanket. They soak the wounds free where the fabric had started to bond and pick out bits of gravel and road filth. The oldest wounds, the gashes on his face and chest are tended to first. The one on Indigo’s face hadn’t scabbed completely before the Xi’s started in on him. Eric takes a rag and soaks it, trying to clean the filth from the cut. It’s going to scar no matter what they do but hopefully this will make it neat.

The cut on his chest is the same. Long and diagonal, in two parts where his slender body caught the blade more and less.

He shivers and whines under their hands as Eric puts his chest back together, and Joe cleans his back. Where there’s skin to put back, flesh to align between the tallies on his back, he smooths edges back into place with careful fingers.

When he tries to push his hair back from his face, they see his knuckles worn to near the tendon and bone. He cringes when his fingers won’t bend right and lets Joe tie it back. Filthy still, but dry now.

“The rag.” It’s the first time he’s spoken since the burning. His voice is as raw as his knees and back. He takes it, runs it gingerly between his fingers and dunks it in the warm water. He cleans his hands first. Palms and knuckles and fingertips all leave faint pink and black traces on the cloth. Then, even more gingerly he cleans the stains from his legs, from his sore places. Eric can’t witness the marks on him, the grimaces he makes and goes to see if there’s food in the bunker. Joe sits with him and keeps a hand on an undamaged part of Indigo’s shoulder.

“Hey Eric, help me a minute with his hair?”

Indigo won’t lie down again until his wounds dry, so Joe holds the bowl of water up for Eric to work the long black hair into. They recycled the water, took a first pass at his hair with the now faintly bloody water they’d used on his back. It helps, it helps a lot, and Indigo relaxes somewhat under Eric’s fingers.

Joe leaves them to it when his hair is as clean as it’s gonna get with this bowl of water, Eric’s clever fingers soothing Indigo into quiet noises.

By the time he returns to Indigo and Eric with water in cups and some weird dehydrated stew in a bowl, Indigo’s got his shirt on and looking much better for it.

* * *

 

Indigo wakes in the night and stiffly pulls himself out from under Eric’s arm. His head is pounding, and he can’t see in this complete darkness. So he sits on the edge of the cot because he’s not sure he could find the floor with his feet if he stood, and mentally itches at the pain creeping in his body.

There’s so much of it, no part of him that doesn’t hurt.

He picks with scabbed fingers at his hair and relives in snapshots like a hammer to the face what they did to him.

He twists a loop of hair around a finger and pulls until he can feels strands pulling free, and then lets go. Pull, release. Pull. Release. He wants water, he knows there’s some down here but it’s not within sight of his hand and the idea of venturing into the darkness makes his heart freeze.

So he waits, eyes open against the black and seeing all too much.


	2. Day 1

The morning finds him curled up with his forehead against Eric’s back. Well, Eric finds him like that, there’s no morning in the bunker; Eric simply wakes up at morning time like he always does. He takes a moment’s luxury to lie there appreciate the warm of his crew before prying himself off the cot to take an even greater luxury: enough space to stretch properly.

He’s fine in the dark, but Joe will be pissy about it so he sets a lantern to the dimmest setting and points it at a wall to make it gentle.

Indigo’s the next one to wake, and he comes up with a thrash and a silent no on his lips.

Eric goes to him. “How ya doin’?”

Indigo shakes his head. “Water?”

It’s nothing, just a knife in his back.

Eric brings him last night’s cup. He drains it in two swallows.

“We’ve got, uh. Weird stew?, jerky and some dried fruit. Whatchya want?”

“Fruit? I guess.” He’s looking at his shaky hands with knuckles and palms scabbed black in the dim light. The scabs pull at his skin when he makes a fist. “I’m going to kill him.”

Eric brings the bag of fruit over, the jerky too and sits beside where Indigo is still lying on his side. “The one who knew your name?”

“Yeah.” He takes a piece of fruit and bites the smallest piece off to chew. Mostly, it gives his hands something to hold. “Fuck, I think they broke a tooth on the gag.”

“Jesus.”

Indigo feels around the pain with a fingertip. His teeth have new sharp places, and his fingernail finds a seam in a premolar.

“Yep.”

* * *

 

Joe wants to stay a little longer just to let Indigo heal more. But Indigo fights back, he wants to be on the road again. Places to be, things to deliver, people to keep his mind off of.

* * *

 

“I’ll drive.”

“No.”

“…let him drive.”

“no.”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re not fine.”

“I’m not fine, but I am driving.”

“Just let him, jesus.”

“Fine.”

Indigo takes the driver’s seat and pulls them away from the bunker.

* * *

 

Joe gets on the radio and tries to make contact with the convoy they’d left behind. There is only the harsh whisper of empty air, and Indigo drums his fingers against the wheel.

There’s crack of blood across it. He won’t touch it, but his fingers graze the edge of it in a turn. He shivers.

* * *

 

The dispatcher, after they make their delivery, can find no record of Richie having a family. Indigo hadn’t even know the man had a last name, although he supposes they all did. They find record of his personal vehicle in a lot further west.

The dispatcher assigns them a route that will take them there. They just have to wait a week.

With no family listed, it falls to Richie’s crew to bury him.

They find a lot where it’s legal to bury a man, and put him beside a tree. They all say a few words, mostly to Richie. There’s nothing to say to each other, nothing to fight the thought that they should have gone together. Who are they without their driver?


	3. Day 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> (questionable dental practices)

Indigo’s lucky; not every station has a clinic. This one is rudimentary with not much more than first aid available, and maybe a little second aid too. They test him for blood borne illnesses, and give him some retroactive preventative measures before referring him to the town doctor who also happens to be the area farm vet. It’s better than nothing at all, and the doctor makes a sympathetic but horrified noise when Indigo shows him his teeth.

 

“This one’s cracked.” The doctor taps the tooth and Indigo grimaces at him. “We’re gonna have to pull it.”

 

The doctor looks at the rest of his teeth too. “And smooth all of these-” he taps various teeth “-out a little.”

 

“Just do it.” Indigo looks exhausted, somehow slighter than he really is. “Just do whatever’s gotta happen.”

 

His jaw is numbed, and the doctor goes after the cracked tooth. It comes out in two parts, bloody and recalcitrant. The hole is stitched shut. The doctor tells him that he should have a bridge put in to keep the space. Indigo agrees, and then tells the doctor in numb tongue slurred speach to get on with the filing.

 

The filing is worse than even the cracking of the pulled tooth. The sound grates in his head even though he can’t feel it and he twists his raw fingers bloody again on his steel rings before the procedure’s over.

 

The doctor sends him away with a caution to eat on the other side of his mouth, and a bag of narcotics.

  
Indigo manages to leave the tender and sweet hole in his mouth alone until he runs out of narcotics, and then he tongues endlessly at the stitches. Eric pulls the stitches out two weeks later just to make him stop, but he doesn’t and the tiny holes bleed for a little while.


	4. Days 3 & 4

Indigo fucks off the next day. Grabs his backpack and tells Joe not to worry, that he’ll be back in a while.

He comes back the next morning, scrubbed clean anywhere his skin could be scrubbed and his hair sleek and wavy. He says nothing about it, and Eric says nothing about how he smells like a woman’s shampoo.

* * *

 

Trucks from the convoy trickle in, battered and weary and sans cargo. Crews seek them out and express their condolences and solidarity. Some try to talk to Indigo but he just stares at them with cold flat eyes until they go away.


	5. Day 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Westward

They’re headed west  _ finally _ , lightly loaded and part of a convoy. They meet no resistance, no struggle. Eric and Joe resent that they have to adjust back to a three person rotation, but it’s only a day to their destination. Not a big deal.

After a hundred kay of silence, Joe asks. “How did they know your name?”

Another thirty pass before he responds. “Me’n him, we go way back.”

Joe clearly has more questions, and he’s uninterested in answering them. So, he goes up top and sits on the leading edge of the trailer. Goggles down, jacket wrapped tight, his tether clipped to the bar and his new rifle across his lap.

The wind howls into his face and whips his hair. After a while, he looks up into it and yells, “WHAT THE FUCK” at it.

And then, more quietly. “What the fuck, Nomad.”

He slaps the metal beside him, and winces.

“What the fuck, Indigo.”

His palms are near healed, but the rest of him is not.


	6. Day 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> You can bury a man, but not a car.

Richie’s car poses them a problem. They can’t sell it, they can’t bury it, they can’t give it away because it’ll end up in the hands of the scags. There’s nothing of Richie’s in it; the car is bare and lifeless. Plastics sun-baked and fluids low. So they leave it in the lot, and walk between the other abandoned vehicles. Endless hulks, each a monument and a casket to a life swallowed up by the highway in ways that make the vibration rotted spines of a previous generation seem a desirable way to go.

Indigo brushes his knuckles, curled to make pain, against the cracked and flowered finishes as they walk in silence.


	7. Week 2

They head west some more, and then east again. They are lucky, and see only light skirmishes. Indigo’s body heals; hands flex with ease, the cut on his face scars white and tough, and the scabs on his back and knees and chest fade slowly with time and persistently picking fingers.

He tries, oh he tries to let them heal. But it’s the price he pays, he tells himself.

 _Could have kept my fucking mouth shut. Kept my head down_.

The series of events, snipped and jarred together plays in his head _jackknife gunshot flair of pain as Nomad entered flair of arousal knife dark burning burning raw pain that fist that fucking fist_ , and he slips a hand under his shirt to pick at the scabs and anchor himself in the sting of it.

They land in the depots in the borderlands north of Sun City. A safe place, a compound, defended even though it’s not in the badlands. They’ve got a couple of weeks, and compensation pay, to kill.

They sink the most of the pay into the truck. Fix the damage, and go to war again. Keep hands occupied to forget the dead even as the memory is worked into the bones of the truck. And with far too much time left for Joe’s liking, they wipe the last of the grease and metal from their hands.

Indigo turns his attention to his ute out in the lot, then. He works on her, his baby, his charlatan’s promise of freedom, with a memory of the fire he had when they picked him up so long ago in his eyes. Joe watches, as he pulls a dipstick and watches the bead of fluid shift until he deems it unsatisfactory.

“Come with us.”

Indigo slips the dipstick back into its tube.

“I’m fine.”

Joe nods. They both know Indigo’s lying, but it’s the courteous thing to do.

“We’ll go with you.”

Indigo turns, the pan for the oil change in his arms.

“No.”

He’s small, and the clearance under the truck is such that he can just slide under it. Bucket first, then him, and now Joe can’t see him. There’s the slightest shift when Joe leans against the vehicle.

“You don’t have to do this.”

There’s the rapid click of a ratchet wrench.

“Pretty sure I do.”

“What’re ya gonna do?”

Indigo slides himself out from under the truck, oil-dirt black hands staining the bumper. He shrugs.

“Dunno yet.” Joe’s pretty sure he’s lying again.

“Don’t get killed.”

“I’ll try.”


	8. Week 3: Day 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Shut up, hey, shut up.

It feels weird being alone in his ute after so long with three other men in space barely larger. Sleeping alone, eating alone, driving alone. The dust settles on stalks and stems behind him, blown sideways across the dying fields. There’s nothing out here, nothing between him and they sky except for air that feels so thin.

Even when it crushes his lungs, holds him down, keeps his hands at his sides with the weight of it all.

_ Should have kept my fucking head down. _

The scabs are gone, and the tender skin left behind is taught when he presses his hands flat against his wheel, flat against the metal of the cab when he’s lying on it

_ You volunteered. _

_ They would have fucked me up anyway. _

He raises his fist, elbow against the metal of the cab. Nails digging into his palm. He lets it fall, hand tight and arm limp. Even the whang of flesh on metal sounds morose. 

_ Kept your head down. Could have enjoyed it. _

Deep exhale, shallow inhale. He can feel the scar forming tough across his face.

_ Enjoying rape, you mean. You fucking freak. _

“Shut. The fuck. Up.” He hits the metal he’s lying on again, a stinging open palmed slap.

_ And what do you play at, antagonizing him at every turn. Did you really expect any different? _

_ I got us our freedom. _

_ You’d do it again, too. _

He slams his head back against the metal, and all it feels is numb.


	9. Week 3: Day 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A moment of clarity.

The sun wakes him, and truly he hadn’t missed the feeling of the insect netting on his face. He bunches it away from his face; sits and stretches. The sun, though, is welcome. He opens his mouth to it and inhales the rays, accidentally triggering a yawn.

It’s a beautiful day. One of those days his mother would tell him about before it all went to hell, she’d say. Rations, water, and suddenly the city has something to offer him: tastes barely remembered, and a desire buried in the root of his tongue.

More water makes his head feel less fundamentally misshapen, and he sits on his feet atop the cab. South, to slake a thirst? West, to slake a wound?

South. He has is weapons, but not his tools. His fingers are light and this will be like his scavenger days, like his runaway days. 

It feels good to have a goal, the expectant feeling between striking the match and fumes catching with a whump. It quiets him, burns clean.


	10. Week 3: Day 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> That fist, that fucking fist.

The clarity of a goal leaves him as the sky turns black-purple. He curses the feeling when it’s gone.  _ I don’t need you _ .

_ Could have made the city in one day _ .

He curses himself, in a now familiar cadence. The words flow smoothly over his tongue and into the night air.  _ What are you playing at? _

_ Could have enjoyed it _ .

He slaps the metal beside his bedroll and it thuds dully, muted by his weight and the weight of his tools. Then he flops his hand back across his body, joining the other one in listlessness.  _ Shut the fuck up _ .

_ Fuck off _ .

He stares up at the sky, his eyes open until the stars spin and blur and hurt. There’s little difference when he shuts his eyes, and his fingers saw at the seam-edges of his shirt. The space between his fingernails and the flesh of his fingers feels hot and raw and wet.

He touches his fingertips to his chest, and he can not tell if his body is lying to him.

Even the bitter jabber in his head can’t keep the memories quiet.  _ jackknife gunshot that ugly fucking bikie pain dark burning burning raw pain that fist that fucking fist _ , and he presses his hands flat against his chest and belly like he could contain it that way. He can feel it, memory-sense of the pain. He digs his fingers in.

_ fucking bikie burning raw pain that fist that fucking fist _ . He slaps himself, the report sharp and sudden.

He sits up, body clenched around the betrayal of cumming on Nomad’s fist. He screams, at the blinding dark, at Nomad, at his memories and his body and his  _ stupid cock _ betraying him now, too. Slouching, Indigo pushes himself back against the hard wall of the ute and shoves his hand down his pants. His grip is tight and cruel, and he jerks his cock hard against his belly before giving up and shoving his pants down.

It’s not enough, and he can’t clear his mind the way he wants it. It’s stuck on  _ that fist that fucking fist _ and he growls.

Standing, he kicks his pants the rest of the way off and sticks a long arm through the back window of the cab to grab his backpack. There’s lube in one of the pockets and as soon as Indigo’s got it in his fingers, the bag lands on the mess of tools that permanently resides in the bed of the ute. He tries to lie back, sit back the way he was. But every still-healing point on his body is aware now and won’t let him settle. He twists and turns angrily, until he somehow ends up on his knees and a curled under shoulder with two dripping wet fingers jammed in his ass.

His shirt slides down his back in fits and starts, slowly bunching up from the force of his thrusts. He grunts and curses and jams another finger in, and presses the side of his face against the sleeping mat.

_ What the fuck are you playing at? _

Indigo pants and thinks about the pain in his knees and his shoulder and shoves his pinkie finger in on the next jab into himself. Now his thumb points away from his hand, and sometimes presses against his balls.

_ Enjoying it, huh _ ?

Hair gets in his face and he moves his head but his skin finds wetness when he places it back down. He squeezes his eyes shut tight. His eyelashes stick together.

_ Shut up shut uP Fuck off just fuck off fuck _

He tucks his thumb against his palm. He pushes.

Dry skin catches tender not-wet-enough skin across his knuckles.

_ fuck fuck fuck fucking shiT _

_ You need him. _

He yanks his hand out.

_ I am going to kill him. _

_ You’re going to find him, and beg for it. _

He falls into an untidy, uncomfortable pile.

He cries.


	11. Week 3: Day 6

He does it again the next night. This time, he vomits over the side of the ute, too. 

It’s mostly bile. He needs to eat.


	12. Week 3: Day 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Go to the city, she said. Go to the city! It is better there.

The city is different now. Tall, alienating, looming. It closes in on him, and he crawls in on himself. It is not a well place, the endless scratch of his thumbnail across the embossed letters on his lighter only confirms it. 

It is not the place of prosperity that he left behind. He thinks, as he worries at the new rough spot in his thumbnail with his teeth, that it’s eating itself alive. That it’s starving.

That Richie died for nothing.

He collects everything he could need, even though the plan feels dulled now; new-to-him canisters, fuse cord, remote ignition, some proper explosives. His old contacts are long gone, and the street language has changed in his absence. But it is not difficult to speak the pretty words, and back it up with solid money and goods to make the trades. Or, simply take it. His fingers remember this game, even if he no longer feels the elation of a clever steal.


	13. Week 4: Day 3

He’s guttering by the time he finds a diner. All quilted chrome and leering orange neon saying  _ open _ and it smears in his eyes, a ghostly failing trail. He pushes the door open.

The waitress greets him, but her eyes don’t meet his but linger on his face. He’s acutely aware of the still so fresh scar, and the knife handle peeking from inside her left boot.

_ The thing with trucking _ he thinks as he orders a milkshake is that  _ I never get to spend my money _ . He’s wealthy, compared to so many people now and he can afford to order something as indulgently energy intensive as a milkshake in these times.  _ So many of us don’t get to spend our pay _ . 

Reclaimed and consumed by the trucking companies when a brother dies. The milkshake is the coldest thing he’s had since as long as he can remember. It sears into his brain, and renders him incapable of dwelling on anything but that freezing pain. He forces the ache to stay with him so long that he can hardly speak when the slim and wide eyed waitress comes for his order.

He rubs condensation from the shiny steel side of the cup the shake came in and looks past the scratches and dings to see himself through her eyes. Distorted by curvature, white scar streaking under his dark eyes, hair ever falling into his face, unwashed and his shirt buttoned only enough to not get quibble from the shirt & shoes sign still wearily affixed to the floor. An unwashed man with money. What a spectacle.

He wants to reassure her that he’s not a threat, but the words fall dead on his tongue. It is perhaps a lie, perhaps the truth. He grunts his thanks when she brings the food.

The food is good, sates that memory-desire hidden under his tongue. But it leaves him hollow, rotting away from the inside. He knows what he needs.


	14. Week 4: Day 3

He can feel it on the inhale: this shit is laced with something. He’s curious.

Smoke leaks from between barely parted lips. He closes his eyes. He exhales, deep and slow.

He opens his eyes.

The boy across from him is seated on the table part of the park bench. Indigo stares at him and contemplates their oppositeness. Their similarities extend beyond the park bench they’re on to Indigo remembering being young and hunting death. They end there, the other is blonde, kinked hair viciously bleached and contrasting with his dark skin. He’s dressed in dark colors, leathers and the steel bones of the bracers on his arms glinting in the half light of the moon. The boy exhales, smoke boiling thick and harsh from his flared nostrils. 

Indigo looks away.

He twists the smoke between his fingers like it’s a small snake. Obedient, cold, and smooth. It’s definitely laced with something.

The boy looks at his mates, seated and sprawled around him. He nods. They nod. Indigo watches them as he partakes in their smoke. The one on the table meets his gaze. “Are you racing tonight?”

Indigo shrugs.

The boy’s voice is smooth, despite the smoke. Indigo wants to reach down his throat with his fingers, and touch it. He inhales.

“Nothing to race.”

“Race with us.”

Indigo shrugs, very slowly. He points at his arms, bare under his rolled up sleeves.

“I’m not one of you.”

The boy nods.

“Come with us.”

Indigo’s seen the wrecks when the light comes. He’s picked over their corpses, and pushed their chassis away with the flat angry face of the truck.

“Sure.”

The boy tips from his crosslegged position to his knees on the table. He extends one arm, one finger. Nails painted white where his lighter skinned mates are painted black. He touches the end of the scar under Indigo’s eye, and drags his nail down it.

Indigo does not shiver, does not move.

The boy slides off the table, motions that could have been fluid hampered by poorly healed breaks and steel boned armor. Indigo stands, and jumps from the table. For a moment he is one with the ground, and then his boots pull free. Then, he follows the black armored postures through the night.

These are not, he can taste in the air and feel in his bones when the pack starts their cars, fast or strong vehicles. Not like Indigo’s used to. None of the chromed steel and blown V12s and liter bikes that tie his life together. These are a sledgehammer prayer, original colors shattered off and graceful stock lost under weld beads and angle brackets.

He exhales. The taste of exhaust coats his tongue.

“How much glory for being crushed by a freighter?”

The driver, the blond boy turns to him and laughs. His smile is white in the moon-dark, and his front teeth are broken.

“Enough.”

A circle forms, rotating across six tar-black lanes and the dead median. Dust rises, pale and mixed with exhaust fumes as a ghostly boy tosses canisters into the ring. He jumps from the vehicle, followed by another boy and together they mark the field for tonight’s battle. Used to be water in those canisters. There might still be water in those canisters, but the fumes of it make Indigo cough like the sick engines. The two boys pick vehicles out of the ring, and jump up onto them as it rotates. They give a thumbs up to each other, and slip through the gutted and strutted gapes of the windshields of their chosen vehicles.

The leader revs his engine.

The howl deafens along the line and the first impact blurs into the crushing roar. Indigo wishes, then, for boarding spikes to cling to the roof with. He goes anyway, legs hooked through the bars of the back window and fingers wedged tight into the creased metal roof. The impacts bruise his legs with the bars.

He thinks that they will break, but they do not.

A boy looks at Indigo, and he looks back. The boy has an ugly cut on his head, blood rolling black down his face and across his lips and smeared on the back of his knuckles and on his wheel. He’s grinning, he touches the blood with his tongue.

He’s screaming, choking on the new blood. The tip of his tongue is gone, taken by a crash. He turns, heels his vehicle over and slides it sideways into a resounding crunch. Another car hits him, long and steaming.

An engine goes quiet.

Indigo knows now what the shit they were smoking was laced with. He knows these boys; they feel nothing and chase death to feel anything. The boy crawls onto the roof of his vehicle, and disappears when the locked up chassis is rocked.

There is no scream.

He thinks that seeing that boy disappear was important, somehow. That they choose this because it’s the only thing they can choose. Escaping the dying life by playing right into it.  _ Like me _ . He reaches into the air and touches the boy’s red and gold soul.

He is pure, only fearful death on his hands.

Indigo can smell it before he sees it. The quick drying fuming streak of a ruptured tank pissing gasoline down the hot flank of the car onto the tar field. It mixes with the heady fumes. He’s a new kind of high, the smoke got him hooked but now it’s adrenaline and oxygen deprivation. He can feel it, the expectant moment fused to toxic air before it catches with a whump. He knows this like his toes know the form of his boots.

They will die here, all of them. The sloppy oil rich field will catch and they will burn.

It is an invigorating thought.

He pulls his legs free of the bars. Puts his boots flat on the crushed up trunk and stands. It’s like he’s walking the trailer when Richie swerves to shed parasites. Only now he has no tether, no slider bars, nothing to save him from the impacts except his own reflexes. He feels strong, drops to grip the welded reinforcements and roll with the crash. He laughs, high and manic.

There’s hot metal out there. Not engine hot, not coolant hot. Fires of hell hot: what’s left of a puked catalytic converter melting. The glow comes from deep under a crunched up car, reflected by the slick tarmac, made prophetic in the haze of coolant wafting away.

He jumps. The impact shrieks sideways under him. The boy who touched his scar twists away and doesn’t move. How do they love each other in the day, and kill each other in the dark? His boots land solid on the split hood. Three steps and the roof flexes under his slight weight. Do they mourn their dead? His boots land solid between rails welded to the roof, the driver screams and he jumps again.

He feels the air pressure change. He turns his back on it. It feels like a barn about to go down, a barn about to exhale burning hay dust across the landscape. He knows.

He jumps.

The shockwave slams him across the back, slings him singes him. The ground bruises him, a superficial ache over all the others and he rolls, ears ringing. He’s not on fire, no more than he usually is. Others are not so lucky.

Most of the track is burning now and any vehicle that can move, any vehicle with a driver is spat out down the road. Indigo steps close to the flames and stamps on the edge of the fire to keep it on the tarmac. One car, the welded steel teeth of its grill now twisted into a proper snarl runs the fire. It emerges from the other side dripping flaming globs from between teeth and smoking under the wheel wells.

There’s a couple boys with sledgehammers jamming their vehicles back into working order. Two more with smaller hammers are bending armor back into shape and then splinting their comrades with it. The scavengers will come soon, and they want to be gone. No glory in dying in the teeth of a feral or between the hands of the Armalites. Maybe a third, maybe a quarter of the vehicles that showed to the race made it from the fire and in a pack with vehicle-less drivers hanging off the sides, they limp and grind their way to their regular haunts.

Indigo simply hops off and walks away when they’re inside the city again. They do not holler, do not chase.


	15. Week 4: Day 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Good morning!

The sun drags him into the light, pries him from the corner of the bed of his ute that he’d rolled himself into. He rolls and stretches, his new bruises groaning against the metal and the edges of the new equipment for which the plans have been abandoned. It feels good and clean, like the first breath of air outside a tent. Also, he’s hungry.

He goes in search of someone who will trade him an egg.


	16. Week 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Home again?

His bones shift strangely when he returns to the truck with Joe and Eric. They’d cleaned the cab and the sleeper, all traces of the brutality gone. But Richie is still absent, and the marks in Indigo’s body go deeper than his flesh and bone. They have questions hidden behind their teeth, and he smiles for them. They seem to be satisfied.

He is efficient with his shots.


End file.
